of themselves significant. The Italian
Futurists are at the opposite pole to Post-Impressionists because they
treat form and colour as vehicles for the transmission of facts and
ideas. _Polka_ and _Valse_ by Severini are, in intention, as descriptive
as _The Doctor_ by Sir Luke Fildes; only they are meant to describe
states of mind, whereas _The Doctor_ purports to describe a situation.
Whether, in fact, they succeed in describing anything, and, if so,
whether what they describe is of much consequence, are questions for the
psychologist. The critic of art has only to note that the forms and
colours are in themselves insignificant and in their relations
commonplace; they are also those much affected of late by the more
adventurous students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Futurism is a negligible accident: the discoveries of Cezanne are safe
in the hands of the French masters, with whose names the catalogue
bristles--Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Marchand, Derain,
Marquet, Friesz, Herbin, l'Hote. Unluckily, the big artists are, for the
most part, meagrely represented by rather unimportant works, of which,
by the way, a good many are already familiar to picture-goers. I think I
never met so many old faces in a modern exhibition. And though I shall
never complain of encountering a Matisse or a Marchand, though it be for
the third time in eighteen months, to be vexed by some mediocre remnant
from the summer exhibitions strikes me as an unnecessarily sharp tax on
the patience.

I do not grumble at the reappearance of Wyndham Lewis's _Kermesse_,
which has been altered and greatly improved since its last appearance at
the London Salon. Lewis promises to become that rare thing, a real
academic artist. He is academic in the good sense of the word--that is
to say, he uses a formula of which he is the master and not the slave.
He uses it as a means to vast organizations of form, designed, I
imagine, to have something of the austere and impressive unity of great
architecture. He succeeds to a surprising degree. The enemy that dogs
him in all his works is an excessive taste for life. He is inclined to
modify his forms in the interest of drama and psychology, to the
detriment of pure design. At times his simplifications and rhythms seem
to be determined by a literary rather than a plastic conception.
Probably this is not the kind of criticism which by now Wyndham Lewis
must have learnt to disregard. He is more accustomed, I susp